The 5 Most Talked About Billionaires on Social Media

The announcement of the 2015 Forbes billionaire list is always a bit of an occasion as the public is given an insight into the movers and shakers in the world of the mega rich. This year, with a combined fortune of around $7 trillion dollars the world’s 1826 billionaires have more wealth than the GDP of the UK and France combined. Here at Talkwalker we decided to see which of the ultra-wealthy were the most discussed online over the last 30 days and see how active they were on social networks.

The Top 5

First a look at whether the richest billionaires are also the most discussed online:

So Talkwalker's social media ranking matches the Forbes list at the first and third spot but differ a fair bit otherwise.

Digging a little deeper into the social media ranking we can see how it breaks down:

(Online mentions over the last 30 days for the top 20 Forbes Billionaires)

Bill Gates' 340,000+ mentions put him around 130,000 ahead of his closest competitor Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who had around 216,000 mentions. These two were far ahead of third place Warren Buffet who had just over 37,500 mentions, or around a tenth of Gates' figure. The top 5 is rounded out by Carlos Slim the Mexican Telecoms magnate with around 35,000 and then founder of Bloomberg and former New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg with about 24,000 mentions.

Online conversations about Gates were pretty varied ranging from his comments about the dangers of artificial intelligence to discussions about whether it matters if politicians dropped out of college when pioneers like Bill Gates and Mike Zuckerberg never finished their university studies. For Zuckerberg much of the focus was on his and his wife's gargantuan $75 million dollar donation to a San Francisco hospital whilst for Buffet online conversation focused mainly on his business activities and prowess as an investor.

Billionaire's don't even have to tweet to drive audience activity

In this age of Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook etc you might expect a Twitter account to be a formality for the modern billionaire but this doesn’t appear to be the case. Of the top 20 billionaires of the Forbes list less than half had a Twitter account and of those, only Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg actually seem to use it!

Of the two active billionaire tweeters, Bloomberg was the most active tweeting 63 times over the last month to Gates’ 53. But when it comes to interacting with billionaire’s on Twitter it seems it doesn’t always matter whether the Twitter account is actually functioning:

Bill Gates leads the way once again here with Michael Bloomberg just behind but interestingly the likes of Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim and Mark Zuckerberg also have an impressive amount of audience activity this month. Especially when you taken into account that the last time Buffet tweeted was February last year and Zuckerberg’s last tweet was in 2012. As for Carlos Slim, he’s never tweeted at all!

Best of the Rest

Here are a few other things we can take away from these figures and some of the other billionaires featured on the list:

1. Tech billionaires perform pretty well online with half of the top 10 most talked about online coming from tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

2. Many of the richest female billionaires have fairly low profiles online with Liliane Bettencourt the only female billionaire to make the top 10 of the 20 billionaires we looked at.

3. Quite a few of the wealthiest people in the world made barely any mark on the online world at all like Christy and Jim Walton heirs to the Walmart fortune and Casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson who all generated fewer than 100 online mentions this month.

This year's Forbes list has shown us that billionaires can be any age, are both men and women and come from all industries with a recent bias towards tech but the undisputed leader online is the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Not only is he an extremely wealthy man but he’s socially savvy too: the ultimate modern billionaire!

And Finally...

As a parting gift, here is the top tweet about our social media champion, Mr. William H. Gates:

That was our take on the Forbes Billionaire list but if you have any thoughts of your own about the world’s super rich why not get in touch in the comments below!

Richard is part of the content team at Talkwalker and he seems to have been around for ages though nobody is sure for quite how long. He loves to analyze the impact of current events using social media and find new ways for businesses to get more from listening and analytics.

When he's not tapping away at his keyboard writing a new blog or report, he can be found inexpertly discussing politics and sport with other Talkwalkerites or enjoying the world's foremost culinary delicacy - the toasted cheese sandwich.